At 2:06 AM -0400 8/4/96, anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com wrote:
You guys are confused. The actual telephone call may cost only 2 cents/min, but the accounting and billing procedures are way more expensive. As long as they are doing any kind of usage-based charging, that actual act of charging will continue to cost considerably more than the data transmission.
Ah. So, why settle the transactions for digital cash and skip all that overhead? Yet another application for micromoney. It seems to me that I've been arguing -- for two years now -- that digital bearer certificate settlement will prove to be *much* cheaper than book-entry settlement, and here the answer's been looking at us, straight in the face, all this time. Anybody have any ideas how to go about measuring the savings between accumulating, storing, and processing call-billing data and simply paying for them before/during/after the call with digital cash? I hear this strange rumbling underground. Hey, isn't that "Dad" Joiner? Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/